Tag: Flashback Friday

Review – A Face Like Glass

Posted December 12, 2014 by in Reviews / 8 Comments

Cover of A Face Like Glass by Frances HardingeA Face Like Glass, Frances Hardinge
Review from November 24th, 2012

I’d never heard of Frances Hardinge before, and I have no idea how I came across this on the Kindle store, but I’m so very glad I did. It’s an enchantment of a book — I think I said something similar, recently, about Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and I can see the similarities there: the long games being played in both plots, the dazzling strangeness of the worldbuilding, the magic of it all. But at the same time, they’re very different stories: it’s just something about the flavour that’s similar.

A Face Like Glass is marketed as YA, but I don’t think you should see that as a discouragement. It’s not one of those YA books that slots neatly into the ranks of the YA books that’ve come before: it’s something wild and entirely itself. The same goes for the fact that I’ve tagged it as dystopia — it doesn’t follow the current dystopia tropes either. It felt like a breath of fresh air for me.

I got hooked on it from Amazon’s preview, which is worth a look: it’s a slowish start compared to the pace the book gets to near the end, but if you’re intrigued by it, you’re in for a wonderful ride. I loved every scrap of it, to the extent where I’m almost afraid to look for Frances Hardinge’s other books in case they aren’t as good. I love Neverfell and I love the bizarre details of the world and all the weird concepts like people being unable to perform expressions without learning them and…

Basically, it’s a heck of a ride. Best impulse buy of my year, up to and including my big plush Moomin. Possibly excluding only the ticket I bought to the screening of Avengers Assemble that got me hooked.

Rating: 5/5

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Review – Chime

Posted December 5, 2014 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Chime by Franny BillingsleyChime, Franny Billingsley
Review from March 3rd, 2013

Where do I begin to talk about Chime? It’s a magical story and it’s not: the plot revolves around magical beings, around what are essentially soul-sucking vampires, around a girl who is a witch. The plot revolves around a stepmother, and illness, around a girl who is made to believe that she’s a bitch. Sorry: Chime makes me want to play with words, makes me think a little like Briony (which was, by chance, almost my own name).

I can quite see why some people don’t like it. It requires thought, patience, and a willingness to tread out new brain-paths. Briony isn’t an easy narrator, and she isn’t reliable either, as she constantly tells us. The narrative isn’t a straightforward quest, it’s a maze, it’s full of funhouse mirrors.

I loved this. I found the culmination of it all satisfying, and I happily followed the maze through to the end. I loved the friendship that turned into love and also remained friendship, so much more solid-feeling than the kind of romances that fiction is enamoured of where there’s a spark and then a flame without any time in between. I loved the characters, and I would prefer to read them again.

But if you read fifty pages and you’re not intrigued, if you read fifty pages and you would like to kick Briony, if you’d like to stop reading, then stop. It probably isn’t going to magically turn out to be the book for you.

Rating: 5/5

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Flashback Friday

Posted December 4, 2014 by in General / 6 Comments

Hey folks! I’ve decided that each week, instead of uploading a whole new review on a Friday, I’m going to pick out one of my old reviews from before I had this blog, and post it up here in all its glory. This does three things: it gives me some extra content, giving me chance to spread out my new reviews more; it lets me archive some good reviews from Goodreads, which I’m steadily coming to dislike as a platform for reviewing; and it gives you the chance to see reviews of mine you may not have seen before.

I’ll start doing this from tomorrow; I promise that it’ll always be clear when it’s an old review and when it’s from, in the same way as I make it clear when I’ve received a review copy. Consider this advance warning that I can dig all the way back to 2007, and I was totally a brat at 17…

If anyone else would like to join in on this, maybe we could make a thing of it? I’m open to suggestion.

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